Case Study Tag: Investigative

Newsroom overview

Who They Are
A national, born-digital publication focused on policy analysis and investigative journalism that has branched out into lifestyle, sports, and business coverage
Location
Cape Town, South Africa
Founded
2009
Membership program launched
2018
Monthly unique visitors
10 million+
Number of members
19,356
Percentage of revenue from membership
30 to 35 percent

With 19,356 active members as of November 2022, Maverick Insider, the Daily Maverick’s membership program, is one of the largest in the world. In the last couple years, membership revenue has allowed it to launch a weekend print edition, publish books, and more than double its staff. 

But at any point in time, the Daily Maverick has thousands of lapsed members with credit cards on hold, many due to high rates of credit card fraud and a lack of quality payment processors in the market – something out of their control. 

That’s why Maverick Insider Retention Manager Tinashe Munyuki has been focused almost exclusively on winning back on-hold members, reinstating about 10,000 since 2020. For context, the Daily Maverick has had an average of 1,100 members on hold at any point in time.

“Had that work not been done, we wouldn’t have had the growth we’ve had… and we certainly wouldn’t be feeling so confident,” said General Manager Fran Beighton. 

This case study will walk you through the tactics Munyuki has employed to bring those members back. What this case study won’t cover is member retention tactics such as a thorough onboarding, stewardship, and member engagement. You can find advice on that in the handbook. (Jump to “Retaining your members”)

Why this is important

Growth is comparatively easy in the early years of a membership program. But as a program approaches maturity, like Maverick Insider’s program, growth can get challenging – especially if you are losing a substantial number of members along the way.

As Beighton said, “Retention is everything. It’s easier to retain than to acquire.” 

A combination of economic hardship, credit card fraud, and subpar payment gateways means that at any point in time the Daily Maverick is looking at thousands of credit cards on hold every year – and thousands in lost revenue.

The research team has heard similar challenges from newsrooms all over the world. Retention advice tends to focus on how to keep members from intentionally canceling membership. But winning back on-hold members requires a different strategy – several, actually. As you’ll see, there’s no single slam-dunk tactic that wins back hundreds of on-hold members at a time. Instead, it requires near-daily effort, resulting in a drip-drip of small wins.  

What they did

There are four prongs to the Daily Maverick’s strategy for winning back on-hold members.

  1. They send frequent emails asking people to update their credit card.

Most newsrooms do this (called dunning), but the Daily Maverick is more aggressive than most. Munyuki sometimes sends as many as three reminder emails a week. They constantly test subject lines, length of emails, sender name, incentives, and more to increase open rates. The key is to keep these emails fresh in tone and content so they don’t become background noise. 

Occasionally they add conditional modules to their newsletters letting recipients know their membership is on hold. This yields three to seven conversions each time it’s included. 

A screenshot of a lapsed membership message in First Thing, their flagship newsletter
  1. They process transactions again.

Sometimes credit cards fail because of insufficient funds or a bank connection issue. This captures those errors. 

  1. They get on the phone.

In August 2022, they spent two hours calling and WhatsApping 194 on-hold members, reaching 93 of them. The call team included two Maverick Insider staff and three reporters. 

Any reader with an account, not just members, can opt to follow certain journalists and receive an email when that journalist publishes a story. This feature helped the team identify journalists with big followings who could call members and might have a higher chance of nudging on-hold members to take action.

Maverick Insider Manager Julia Harris wrote a script that everyone could follow, but after just a couple calls, they shifted to a more natural, 1:1 conversation. 

Munyuki emailed everyone on the call list just before the calls started so if a lapsed member said they wanted to renew, the instructions were already in their inbox and no payment details would have to be taken over the phone. Most calls were over after just 30 or 40 seconds, but occasionally they lasted 10 minutes. 

The call team used burner phones but one journalist started WhatsApping people from his personal phone, Beighton said. It became a challenge he wanted to win and he ended up taking the rest of his list home with the goal of getting them all “across the line.” 

  1. They show them grace. 

The Daily Maverick allows people to pause their membership if they can’t afford it for a time. They send regular reminders that can be summarized as, “If you still can’t pay, that’s no problem, but if you’re able to pay again, please update your account.”

The results

Regular emails asking people to update their payment information remain their most successful tactic. Overall, dunning emails have won back the vast majority of their lapsed members in 2022. 

From the multitude of tests they’ve run, the team has learned: 

  • Short, to-the-point emails are most successful, as are direct subject lines like “Your membership is overdue”.
  • Sends from Munyuki make a difference. His emails had lower open rates but higher conversions. People who no longer wanted to be a member wouldn’t open it; people who had lapsed accidentally knew immediately what the email was about and would open.
  • Sending dunning emails from journalists can backfire. One sent from a well-known journalist had higher open rates but also a much higher unsubscribe rate when people realized what it was about.
  • Incentives don’t convert on-hold members. Munyuki experimented with offering on-hold members discount vouchers for products in Daily Maverick’s online store, which includes not just branded swag but books. Conversion rates are “significantly low”, Munyuki said. In June 2022 they made this offer to 909 on-hold members and won back 70 of them. In October 2022 they made this offer to 799 on-hold members and regained 54 of them. These conversion rates are comparable to their win-back efforts that don’t involve any incentives, but more costly due to the discounts offered.  Once a quarter Daily Maverick also offers voluntarily paused members an opportunity to resume payments at a lower membership tier price with the full benefits of the higher tier, but these discounted memberships don’t show meaningful conversion either. 

The tactic of processing credit cards again yields an 8 to 10 percent success rate, Munyuki said. From December 2021 to November 2022, they’ve retried credit cards 3,700 times, winning back close to 300 members. 

Their phone banking day taught them a lot – not just about that tactic, but about others that might work. They called 194 people and reached 93. Of those 93 people they reached, 78 said they would update and 11 actually updated their credit card details. They weren’t able to track the WhatsApp conversion as precisely, but they found the people they reached there to be friendlier and more engaged. Because the phone banking turned out to have comparable results to other lower effort win-back tactics, they’re investing more resources in that WhatsApp strategy now. 

They’re planning on getting WhatsApp for business, and in October 2022, they used WhatsApp to let people know about home delivery for DM 168, their weekend newspaper. Harris hypothesizes that this works because people are more likely to ignore a phone call from a number they don’t recognize than a WhatsApp message – but the thing they’re paying the most attention to is how much more responsive people are via WhatsApp than email. 

Harris said they used WhatsApp soon after to notify people who receive their weekend print edition at home that there were delivery issues and their newspaper would be delayed. People saw and responded to the texts promptly.

Up next: on-screen notifications for lapsed members. 

The Daily Maverick doesn’t have a paywall, and that’s not going to change. But that complicates retention efforts. If someone’s membership lapses, they might not realize it because their ability to access stories doesn’t change.

But they recently launched a registration wall, which means people have to be logged in to read and can receive regular renewal reminders in another place that’s not a crowded email inbox. They’ll soon start experimenting with ribbons at the top of a page notifying people of expirations and with a link to a payment page.

An early demo of the ribbon. Courtesy of the Daily Maverick.

What they learned

Incentives don’t convert. Benefits and discounts have never played a major role in their membership growth, and it turns out they don’t do much for winning back lapsed members either. Incentives to rejoin had little impact. Those who update their information do it because they want to support the Daily Maverick, Munyuki said. It’s the same with member conversion. 

Emails don’t last as long as phone numbers. Phone banking showed that many lapsed members were lapsed because they changed jobs and lost access to their former email address. But people tend to give their personal phone numbers, which last much longer than email addresses.

Eventually, you have to stop trying. After a year, they’re unlikely to get someone back. They stop investing any resources at that stage, letting on-hold members go with a final email that says, “We still need you, but we don’t think you’re coming back.” 

Key takeaways and cautionary notes

You can be more aggressive with the frequency of email reminders than you think. If someone wants to be a member, you’ll get their attention. If they don’t want to be members, they might unsubscribe – but you were unlikely to win them back anyways. 

Winning back members happens through routine. You can’t win back hundreds of members with one or two pushes a year. Winning back lapsed members takes several different tactics, all executed regularly and with a close eye on the data. 

Email is efficient, but that means inboxes are crowded. It can take dozens of dunning emails to accomplish what one push on WhatsApp accomplishes because of how quickly member renewal emails can get buried in people’s inboxes. A successful dunning strategy requires constant experimentation to make those emails stand out. 

Other resources 

Disclosure: Membership Puzzle Project supported the Daily Maverick’s membership program in 2019 with a grant from the Membership in News Fund.

National Investigative Digital native Daily Maverick Retaining our Members

Newsroom overview

Who They Are
The Bristol Cable is a community-owned cooperative news organization in Bristol, U.K.
Location
Bristol, U.K.
Founded
2014
Membership program launched
2014
Monthly unique visitors
50,000
Number of members
2,700
Percentage of revenue coming from membership
35%

The Bristol Cable is a British member-owned cooperative news organization. As a cooperative, community members are the owners of the Cable, not its staff or a company – and as owners, members are legal shareholders and therefore must be consulted when making certain strategic decisions that affect the organization. 

But just because members can weigh in doesn’t mean they will. The Cable team puts significant time and effort into making the process of participating in strategic decisions easy to understand, accessible, and enjoyable.

In the beginning the Cable mainly involved member-owners in decisions through its Annual General Meeting (AGM), which brings together staff and members to report on the accomplishments and challenges of the past year, review finances, discuss key questions, define strategy for the year ahead, and elect voluntary non-executive board members. 

Over time, based on member-owner feedback, they’ve added more frequent, lower-effort ways to weigh in on the Cable’s decisions as well, which made it possible for a greater number of members to play a role. This case study will walk you through how they involve members at different stages, based on the level of involvement they want.

Why this is important

The AGM is the principal way that the Cable’s members can influence the strategy and policies of the newspaper. Although the number of news organizations making their community members their owners is small, a growing number of newsrooms are exploring ways to involve  community members in newsroom decision-making. The Cable’s AGM offers one way to do that. 

The meeting also allows staff members to share their thinking about the paper’s work and respond to member feedback in a regular way that is manageable and is respectful of members’ time. 

But if you only offer one way to participate in decision-making, you’ll exclude many of your members. Over time, the Cable developed a participation ladder that expanded the number of ways members could weigh in, offering opportunities to participate that matched the level of involvement each member wanted. 

What they did

As a member-owned cooperative, anyone who becomes a member of the Cable has a say in the direction of the organization. Every year members elect a non-executive board of directors, which plays an advisory role, while the Cable’s staff run its day-to-day operations 

Other than serving on the board of directors, participating in the Annual General Meeting is the key way that members participate in strategic decision making. Each year members vote on the Cable’s budget and elect the board of directors. They also offer input on two to three strategic decisions that the staff wants feedback on that year. 

For example, in 2020 they discussed the Cable’s five-year strategic plan, which focused on topics such as whether the Cable should expand the geographic footprint of its coverage around Bristol and how it can create additional partnerships with local organizations. The goal is to have a wide-ranging discussion that gives the Cable a sense of their members’ values and how they feel about the decisions at hand.

“More often than not we’re trying to get more textured or graded understanding — a temperature check or a steer on things for the team to take away and turn into a project rather than this quite limiting concept of yes/no votes,” said Adam Cantwell-Corn, the Cable’s co-founder and coordinator. 

The AGM, which lasts 2 to 2.5 hours, is critical to the Cable’s mission, so they spend months preparing for it. Historically the Cable has held the AGMs at a local community center or sports hall, although the 2020 AGM was held on Zoom due to the pandemic.

A couple months before the AGM, the Cable staff narrows down the topics it wants to ask the members to weigh in on. They try to focus on larger strategic topics that will yield insights that will help inform how the staff approaches its day-to-day decision making, such as the Ethical Advertising Charter that they drafted at the 2016 AGM. They then share the topics with members in advance of the meeting. 

Then the staff turn to the logistics of the meeting, such as renting tables and chairs and lining up catering from a local restaurant. The Cable also recruits members to help out with tasks such as checking in attendees and confirming they’re actually members who are eligible to vote.

In addition to the logistics, the Cable team undertakes a month-long promotional campaign via their newsletter and social media to both encourage non-members to become members so they can attend and encourage existing members to come.

At the meeting itself, the team plays music, offers food and drinks, and hosts ice breakers to make people feel welcome and encourage them to participate. “One of the overwhelming bits of feedback we received [in previous years] was that it didn’t feel like an AGM, it felt like a community meeting,” Cantwell-Corn said. 

Attendees sit in small groups around tables, and Cable staffers and volunteers facilitate group discussions on the main topics of the evening. They document the conversations on big pieces of paper in the middle of each table to make the process more accessible to everyone. 

Photo via The Bristol Cable

The AGM was moved fully online in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But even before the pandemic, as its membership grew, the Cable took steps to ensure the meetings were more accessible by allowing people to ask questions and offer feedback asynchronously and vote virtually.

The Cable has invested in building custom ‘Community Relationship Manager’ software, where members can respond to polls, participate in exercises, and manage their membership through a single login. (This product, called ‘Beabee’, is currently under development with German newsroom Correctiv.) Allowing online participation made the decision-making process more accessible since not all of its members are able to attend an event on a weeknight. 

The results

The Cable has about 2,700 members, and more than 90 attended the most recent virtual AGM in November 2020. But more than 270 participated asynchronously by voting for the board of directors or submitting questions for staff to answer. In previous years, when they met in-person, about 100 members attended the AGMs each year. 

The strategic discussions at the AGMs have gone from being the beginning and end of the collaborative decisions to the start of a whole series of smaller decisions.  

For example, at the 2017 meeting, the team facilitated a discussion with members about the boundaries between advocacy and journalism, and whether members wanted to see the Cable take a stand on certain local issues. They had small tables of about six people and did exercises such as dotmocracy to collect feedback, such as how members define advocacy. They then asked members to vote on whether the Cable should campaign on certain issues. Most people felt the Cable should pursue campaign journalism. (See full results)

With the affirmative vote in place, the Cable staff began identifying issues that it could take a stand on and build a campaign around.  

It brought some of those specific campaign ideas back to the members for further discussion via one of their monthly membership meetings, which are part meeting, part social event. 

“Okay, here’s what the whole organization as represented by the AGM has said about how we should do campaign journalism as a concept. Now let’s bring it down a level to ‘What should we do in terms of topics?’ What’s pertinent in the city and how can we interact with that as a journalism organization?,” Cantwell-Corn summarized. 

In collaboration with the members, the Cable identified two topics that they could campaign on that year: air pollution in Bristol and safe injection sites for people fighting addiction. They then presented the two topics to all members via an online forum and invited all members to vote on which topic they wanted to see the Cable campaign for. 

More than 600 members voted and engaged in the online conversation, compared with 30 people at the meeting who helped identify potential topics and 12 0people who attended the AGM and decided whether the Cable should engage in advocacy journalism. Air pollution received the most votes and in January 2019 the Cable launched its editorial campaign, Fight for Fair Air, which included investigative stories, editorials, commentary, and more. 

“It went from the AGM to being actually realized as an editorial product,” Cantwell-Corn said.

What they learned

You need to evolve as you grow. When the Cable had its first Annual General Meeting in 2015, it had fewer than 200 members. 

“It’s much easier to manage cooperative decisions when you have 30 people in the room rather than when you have 2,000 members,” said Lucas Batt, the Cable’s membership coordinator. That’s why they first turned to Loomi and later to developing a CRM.

The initial AGMs focused on the constitutional founding and key principles and norms — such as whether and how the Cable should accept advertising. But members’ interest in participating in decisions didn’t wane after those foundational decisions were made, and the Cable didn’t stop involving members either. More recent AGMs have focused on topics such as how to reach new readers and what the Cable can do to be an anti-racist organization. The platforms and topics evolved to fit the needs of the organization as it matured. 

How much involvement members want will vary. So should their options for getting involved. Even as committed cooperative owners, there’s still variation in how much members want or are able to participate. Members often have other commitments and priorities and only so much bandwidth.

The Cable has made it easier to participate by taking some decisions online via voting platforms, providing regular updates to members outside of the AGM, and making fewer open-ended asks, such as asking for feedback about how the Cable should approach editorial decision making. (There’s no single editor — The Cable editorial team operates democratically but independent of the membership on a day-to-day basis.) 

“We now do a lot more work of crafting genuine options for the membership to engage with: this is the scenario, here are a couple of options, and here are pros/cons,” said Cantwell-Corn.

The Cable has also gotten clearer about what each avenue for feedback is for.

The AGM is for big-picture strategic discussions and beginning the feedback loop with members, such as what kind of advertising the Cable will accept and whether the Cable should begin taking stances on some local issues, as detailed above. 

The monthly membership meetings are slightly less involved than the AGM. Although the Cable team originally used them for more nitty-gritty decision-making with members, members said they didn’t need that level of involvement. Now the Cable uses them to keep members up-to-date on the implementation of decisions made at the AGM, help prepare for upcoming AGMs, involve them in specific editorial projects, and hold social events. (However, the monthly meetings have been on pause during the pandemic.) 

When the Cable needs members to weigh in on an ongoing issue, they’ll conduct the discussion and/or vote via the online voting platform to maximize the number of people who can participate. 

At every stage, the Cable takes great care to appropriately frame the discussions and give members a clear sense of the scope of the decision they’re being asked to make. 

Key takeaways and cautionary notes

Not everyone wants to be highly involved. When the Cable began offering online voting, the total number of members who participated in decision-making went up, from the 100 or so people at an AGM to the hundreds that participated in various ways online. Although members’ valued the Cable’s commitment to cooperative decision-making, that didn’t mean they all wanted to attend a multi-hour Annual General Meeting. The stages of decision-making the Cable offers to members is a great example of what MPP calls the “participation ladder.” You need to offer flexible ways to participate if you want to attract a diverse group of participants. 

Always close the loop. If you’re going to ask members to take the time to weigh in on important decisions, you need to show them what you did with their feedback. If you don’t, they’re less likely to weigh in next time you ask for it. When the Cable produced its editorial campaign on air pollution, it showed the AGM attendees who approved the idea of campaigns that the staff not just listened, but was able to act on what it heard. 

Other resources

Local/Regional Investigative Digital native Developing Memberful Routines Bristol Cable

Newsroom overview

Who They Are
The Bristol Cable is a member-owned cooperative news organization in Bristol, U.K.
Location
Bristol, U.K.
Founded
2014
Membership program launched
2014
Monthly unique visitors
50,000
Number of members
2,700
Percentage of revenue coming from membership
35%

The Bristol Cable is a British member-owned cooperative news organization. As owners, members are legal shareholders and therefore must be consulted when making certain strategic decisions that affect the organization. One such decision is what kind of advertising the Cable will accept.

Initially the Cable decided to address that with an “Ethical Advertising Charter” that included types of companies and organizations from whom it would accept advertising from. But that ended up being too restrictive, so in 2017 they worked with members to amend the charter, focusing instead on criteria for what kind of advertising the paper would accept and how it would be presented to ensure that it aligned with the Cable’s values. 

The revised Ethical Advertising Charter helped the Cable balance the need to include its members in the decision-making process with the need to make daily operational decisions in an efficient manner that also isn’t burdensome for members. This case study outlines the process of developing the charter and applying it to advertising decisions.

Why this is important

Like any news organization, the Bristol Cable wants to ensure diversified revenue streams to support and sustain its journalism – and with a dedicated local audience for its print newspaper, the Cable sees advertising as a necessary part of its revenue pie. 

But as a member-owned cooperative, the Cable must ensure that its member-owners have a voice in decision-making – and that includes ensuring that any advertising it accepts is in line with its values as an organization and supported by the majority of its members. 

Previously the Cable had a list of organizational types that member-owners had approved accepting advertising from, but the staff found that relying on a list was too limiting and prescriptive, while also not capturing all factors. 

The Ethical Advertising Charter was amended to instead lay out guidelines for making advertising decisions, which the Cable team can then apply to each individual decision.

Although few news organizations are owned by their members and therefore must invite them into decision-making, more newsrooms are choosing to invite members into decision-making. The Bristol Cable’s solution for balancing the need to make individual decisions quickly while still honoring its member-owners’ values is instructive for any newsroom. 

What they did

From the outset, The Bristol Cable recognized the importance of diversifying its revenue streams, which is why it decided to accept advertising. 

However, they put strong guidelines in place for advertising: advertisements only run in the Cable’s quarterly print newspaper, not online or on any digital platforms, and are limited to only five pages for every 40 that the Cable publishes. 

Today the majority of the Cable’s funding comes from grants, but about 35 percent of its revenue comes from membership and another 5 percent or so comes from advertising, according to Adam Cantwell-Corn, the Cable’s co-founder and coordinator.

As a mission-driven publisher, Cable wanted to ensure that the ads it accepted were in line with its editorial values. So at the Cable’s 2016 Annual General Meeting, the Cable’s member-owners voted to put in place a list of organizational categories that they found acceptable and from which the Cable would be able to take advertising. (The Annual General Meeting is a yearly gathering where member-owners elect a board of directors, approve a budget, and weigh in on key organizational decisions.)

But it quickly became apparent that the 2016 policy was too specific, and the list was not serving its purpose. 

So the Cable team brought the issue back to its owners at the Annual General Meeting in 2017, the following year. Together, they decided to draw up a principle-based advertising policy that the Cable staff could apply to individual advertising decisions as they arose. Cantwell-Corn said the message from members was clear: they trusted the operations team to apply those principles to decisions the way that members intended.

The result was the Ethical Advertising Charter, which publicly explained Cable’s policies toward advertising. The charter has three primary sections: editorial integrity, advertisements, and decision making. 

The editorial integrity section explains that all advertising will be clearly labeled and separated from editorial coverage. It notes that the Cable will “ensure that its editorial content is not influenced by advertisers.” 

The advertisements section of the charter details what kind of ads the Cable will accept. The charter states that the paper will seek to run advertisements that: 

  • “promote social and cultural events and activities that may be of interest to its general readership;
  • products and services that are of direct benefit to local citizens and the city’s economy and environment;
  • such other adverts as are considered to be in line with the Cable’s ethical stance especially those from independent local businesses and third sector organisations.” 

The decision-making section explains that all determinations about advertising are delegated to the Cable’s advertising team to make in line with the member-approved guidelines. 

The results

The Cable staff has found the charter easy to apply, even when tough decisions arise. 

In early 2020 Bristol Water, the city’s public water utility, reached out to the Cable about placing an ad. The Cable’s advertising coordinator flagged it for the leadership team because of “excessive executive pay, dubious tax practises and unacceptable price increases,” and they assessed the company against the Ethical Advertising Charter. 

The editorial staff pulled Bristol Water’s annual financial reports and tax filings. They thought that high rates of executive pay and repeated attempts to raise water prices violated the Cable’s cooperative values, and thus were in conflict with the charter. 

“We believed this would compromise us,” said Lucas Batt, the Cable’s membership coordinator. 

The staff felt comfortable making this decision without consulting members because they had the principles outlined in the charter to guide them. 

Then, in November 2020, Cantwell-Corn published a story about the utility’s attempts to repeatedly raise water prices in Bristol. 

Along with the story, the Cable explained to readers that they had rejected an ad from Bristol Water. The charter stipulates that when the advertising team decides not to proceed with an advertisement, it must provide an explanation to the advertiser and to the public “where appropriate.” 

The Cable also turned it into a membership appeal. 

Cantwell-Corn said the appeal attracted “a number of people” to join, but he noted that it was “part of the overall sweep of communications that we’re doing that are trying to persuade people to convert members.”

The Cable has rarely had to invoke the charter since 2017. Cantwell-Corn attributed that to two key reasons: 

  1. The Ethical Advertising Charter is listed on the Cable’s website, so that helps filter out organizations who think they wouldn’t fit the bill. 
  2. There are lots of places where local organizations can advertise their goods or services — as all legacy news organizations know, it’s often cheaper and more effective to advertise via Facebook or Google where you can target specific audiences.

Cable members support the publication because they believe in what it stands for, and Cantwell-Corn said members were generally supportive of the decisions, such as the decision to take advertising that aligns with their values. 

 “We’re living in an imperfect world,” he said. “We have to have strong ethical principles, but we also make the compromises we need.” 

What they learned

Principles can be better than specifics. The 2016 Ethical Advertising Charter was just a list of organizational categories that the Cable was approved to accept advertising from, which didn’t do the Cable team much good when a company approached them that wasn’t on the list or was in a grey area. The revised charter instead outlines “principles and parameters” that can be applied to any company. This has given the document much broader applicability and removed the need to go back to members on the same issue repeatedly.  

The advertising charter can be a selling point. While the Ethical Advertising Charter does provide some limitations, including potential revenue opportunities, it also is a “mark of quality,” Cantwell-Corn said. And the Cable leans into mission alignment when they pitch advertisers.

The Cable has become a go-to for companies and organizations that are trying to present themselves as more ethical to their consumers, such as green energy suppliers, NGOs, and local businesses. 

“That means we can say to them as a value proposition to the advertisers that, within the boundaries we have set…, your advert will have prominence and will have quality pieces of editorial around it. The other adverts that are present also are validating the quality and the brand validity of your own company by being in The Cable,” Cantwell-Corn said. 

Key takeaways and cautionary notes

The core values you hold could limit existing revenue opportunities, but if you lean into them, they can also open up new ones. There’s a good chance there are companies and organizations out there who have similar values and want to ensure their advertising dollars go to like-minded organizations. By refocusing your pitch to advertisers on what you stand for and why it could be beneficial to align themselves with you, you might attract advertisers that a more transactional pitch might not have.

Establishing trust is not a one-time action. Inviting member-owners to co-write the Ethical Advertising Charter was a smart way to establish or strengthen trust in the Cable’s decision-making. But if the Cable hadn’t consistently applied the charter after it was approved, owners’ role in the drafting wouldn’t have made a difference. Each time the Cable properly applies the charter to an advertising decision, it is giving member-owners yet another reason to trust the Cable. 

Other resources 

Local/Regional Investigative Digital native Developing Memberful Routines Making the Business Case for Membership Bristol Cable

Newsroom overview

Who They Are
A non-profit investigative newsroom committed to informing society of injustices and abuses of power while promoting media literacy and educational programs
Location
Berlin and Essen, Germany
Founded
2014
Launched membership
2015
Monthly unique visitors
670,000
Number of members
10,400
Percentage of revenue from membership
30 percent

In 2018, German investigative newsroom Correctiv set out to make the Hamburg housing market more transparent by finding out who owned residential properties. In many countries, that’s a straightforward process – but German law only allows individuals with a “legitimate interest” to inspect property records. Journalists aren’t covered by that definition. Tenants are.

So Correctiv turned to CrowdNewsroom, a platform they developed in 2015 to help them enlist community members in their investigative projects and assemble data sets. To get the property ownership information they needed for “Who Owns Hamburg?”, they invited readers to upload their leases to the platform. They collected more than 1,000 records, creating a meaningful property register that served as the starting point for investigations into the property market in Hamburg.

Then they took the project on the road. Today Correctiv has property ownership databases for other cities in Germany, and they’ve proven that inviting readers into journalism isn’t just a nice thing to do – it can create more impactful investigations, too.

Why this is important

By identifying a way for people to meaningfully contribute to its work, Correctiv has been able to investigate topics it wouldn’t have otherwise been able to investigate and given community members an opportunity to co-create journalism.  By building its own platform for this way of working, it could collaborate more fully with them. And by partnering with other newsrooms, it’s been able to broaden the number of people who contribute.

Audience participation is most fulfilling for audience members and most impactful for news organizations when the news organization finds the intersection point between their needs and audience members’ motivations to participate. Correctiv succeeded at this: it needed property records, and residents wanted to understand the housing market they lived in.

What they did

Correctiv began developing CrowdNewsroom in 2015 to enable large-scale reader involvement in investigations. Put simply, CrowdNewsroom creates forms that enable structured data collection from users. They first used it for investigations into financial irregularities in local banks and tracking class cancellations in public schools. 

“CrowdNewsroom is like a Google system for answers that are not given yet,” Correctiv publisher David Schraven told Solution Set.

CrowdNewsroom investigations tend to follow the same general process and take a few months to complete.

Here’s a look at how the typical CrowdNewsroom process works, with some details about what that looked like for “Who Owns Hamburg?” project in 2018:

Get the word out. Together with its newsroom partner, Correctiv launches a four-to-six week campaign to spread the word about the project, generate interest among the community, and encourage participation. For “Who Owns Hamburg?”, Correctiv partnered with local newsroom Hamburger Abendblatt, and the local tenant’s association helped promote it. Correctiv and its partner newsroom publish daily stories about the issues the project is trying to uncover, promote the CrowdPlatform callout on social media, and hold events. All of this is done with the goal of collecting data and making people aware of the investigation. 

“Before you start the campaign, you collaborate with the newspaper to give people a sense of what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and why it’s important,” Schraven said. “It’s a series of articles, it’s radio interviews, it’s a real journalistic series of stories.”

Collect data. Throughout the campaign, community members upload data and information into CrowdNewsroom. For “Who Owns Hamburg?”, individuals uploaded their leases to the CrowdNewsroom database and then gave Correctiv permission to pull the records from the land registry in their name. Correctiv also created a website for the Hamburg housing -market investigation where they regularly offered updates on the progress of this project and tenants could store their evidence and information.

To ensure the data is credible, every submission to CrowdPlatform has to be backed up with documentation.  Correctiv will only publish information that is verifiable. 

Process the data. Once the campaign ends, journalists from Correctiv and its partner newsroom will start to process, fact-check, and verify the collected data, then look for patterns to serve as the starting point for stories. Both Correctiv and its partner newsrooms have full access to the database. 

“Then we take the most important stories and report on them,” Schraven said. “But we keep the other stuff just private because this is private data and we’re not going to publish like Wikileaks everything that we’ve found.”

The stories that come out of the CrowdNewsroom are then published and shared by both outlets. 

The results

“Who Owns Hamburg?” took six months to complete. By the end of the campaign, about 1,000 tenants uploaded documents about the owner of their apartments. That data allowed Correctiv to tie more than 15,000 apartments to specific property owners. From that, they discovered that money laundering was behind about 10 percent of the real estate sales in Hamburg. They also determined that more than 1 in 3 of the 707,000 apartments and houses rented in Hamburg belongs to the city’s urban housing association in Hamburg or a cooperative. 

Correctiv also published 10 examples of how non-transparency harms tenants (and what could help), which divulges more findings from the research, such as the fact that tenants don’t always know who their owner is. This was only possible because of the CrowdNewsroom platform.

Correctiv spent about €1 million to develop CrowdNewsroom. Half of the funding came from a three-year €500,000 grant from Google’s Digital News Innovation Fund.

“The rest was from our other sources of income,” Schraven said. “We have foundations funding us, we have individuals donating money to us as a nonprofit. We even have a small for-profit outlet that publishes books.”

What they learned

Making the project accessible for people to participate is key. The CrowdNewsroom investigations can’t happen unless people know about it, so Correctiv approaches its CrowdNewsroom investigations almost as if they were fundraising or political campaigns — it unleashes a torrent of coverage, promotion, and events to get the word out about the investigations and encourages people to participate. It also makes the CrowdNewsroom platform itself intuitive and simple to use. As of February 2019, more than 4,000 people had contributed to CrowdNewsroom projects.

Keep callouts focused. In its first CrowdNewsroom investigations, Correctiv asked its readers overly broad questions. The responses were all over the place and were not as helpful as they could be. Correctiv realized it needed to create a more focused way to ask readers to contribute, and began focusing on seeking out just one thing from readers for each investigation. When asking readers to get involved in the production of journalism, it’s important to spend time making sure the call outs are clear and set up to elicit responses that are actually actionable. 

Collaboration with other publishers is essential. Correctiv also realized that its reporting would have more impact through working with other news organizations. By partnering with a variety of other publishers for CrowdNewsroom, Correctiv is able to reach audiences it would not have access to otherwise. When it covered class cancellations in public schools, for example, one of Correctiv’s partners was a student newspaper, which allowed it to make more focused call outs and also ensured that the reporting was reaching relevant communities. 

Key takeaways and cautionary notes

Correctiv’s investigations would not be possible without the individuals that assisted with the reporting and contributed their information. 

The benefits of co-creation co-creating journalism with community members extends beyond just the investigations at hand. Correctiv can use the platform to identify some of its most engaged constituents and invite them into the reporting process. But Schraven also said the process has been a powerful fundraising tool and more broadly helps educate the community about the importance of independent journalism and how investigative reporting actually works. 

“But to be clear: Not the published stories are most important in running the CrowdNewsroom,” Schraven said over email. “Most important is the debate and the engagement within the community of the newspapers and media organizations we are running the CrowdNewsroom with. It is like a campaign for good journalism in a community.”

“When it comes to community building, something like this is really important,” Schraven said. “People understand that we care about their issues, we’re working on it, and we’re not just talking about it. We really put effort into it. They understand that if we want something like this to happen, we need to support those guys. It works. When you see this CrowdNewsroom, it’s not something you just do for one month — it’s for a few months. You build community around the newsroom. When you’re in the local area, it’s exactly the area you’re publishing day-to-day and all these readers and contributors understand why you’re there.”

Other resources

Local/Regional National Investigative Digital native Developing Memberful Routines Correctiv Building our Membership Tech Stack

Newsroom overview

Who They Are
A national, born-digital publication focused on policy analysis and investigative journalism that has branched out into lifestyle, sports, and business coverage.
Location
South Africa
Founded
2009
Launched membership
2018
Monthly unique visitors
3,500,000
Number of members
13,693
Percentage of revenue from membership
25 percent

When the Daily Maverick launched its membership program, Maverick Insider, they had two goals: make membership as inclusive as possible, and make it easy for those who could provide financial support to do so. So they eschewed membership tiers and implemented a “pay-what-you-can” model, with one key benefit that incentivized those who could afford to contribute more to do so.

Why this is important

The design of your membership program sends clear signals about who it is for. Tiers can help nudge members toward certain financial levels and add predictability to your financial modeling, but they can also bring a level of exclusivity that is discordant with a commitment to equity and inclusion.

The Daily Maverick sought to address this tension by using a pay-what-you-can model for their membership program, Maverick Insiders. Well-designed defaults and benefits nudge those who can afford to pay more to do so, helping the Daily Maverick continue to meet its membership revenue targets.

What they did

When the Daily Maverick launched membership in August 2018, they launched the pay-what-you-can scheme with a slider tool on their membership landing page. Although members could select any amount above R75 (about $4.50), they sought to influence members’ selection by setting the default to R150 (about $10). That was the most common selection among early members, followed by the minimum of R75, or less than $5. (That was the lowest the payment gateway company would process recurring billing contributions.)

The Daily Maverick’s membership landing page includes a slider (Courtesy of Daily Maverick)

This decision was partially informed by the donations drive they ran a few months earlier. The average recurring contribution during that campaign was 100 rand (about $8). The Daily Maverick hypothesized that R150 (about $10) was a reasonable ask once the benefits and community of membership were offered in exchange.

In addition to providing an easier payment process, the Daily Maverick also believes that the pay-what-you-can model helps put their membership in a different category than subscriptions, addressing the issue of subscription fatigue. Tiers are less common among charitable causes, and the Daily Maverick sought to frame joining as charitable support for a free press and equal access to information.

“It taps into a different part of the brain – and budget,” CEO Styli Charalambous writes. “Research shows that the average American household has $30 available for subscriptions and within that space, enough for just one news subscription. And that’s wealthy American households. But people can and do support multiple good causes that resonate with them. We wanted to convey our cause that was worthy of support alongside the Society for the Protection of Animals, National Sea Rescue Institute, or educational development programmes.”

A few months later, the Daily Maverick had a chance meeting with the head of business development for Uber in Africa. Charalambous pitched Uber on the idea of using Uber vouchers to encourage the acquisition and retention of members. They settled on R100 in Uber credit every month to every member contributing R150 or more every month. 

It wasn’t a no-brainer decision – the Daily Maverick knew that its members were not interested in being a part of a corporate reward program, and didn’t want Maverick Insiders to become that. All of their other benefits were connected to the Daily Maverick’s journalism. But events were a critical part of their membership strategy, and this seemed like a valuable way to make it easier for members to get to events. 

For Uber, it was a chance to achieve greater brand awareness and ridership as they entered the South African market.

The results

When the Daily Maverick first launched the pay-what-you-can model, about 50 percent of their members chose the pre-selected R150 option – a percentage the staff was happy with.

The addition of the Uber benefit, however, was a game changer. It worked, almost instantly. According to CEO Styli Charalambous, the number of people contributing R150 or more a month jumped almost immediately to 90 percent with the addition of the voucher. Daily signups also increased by about 30 percent, with monthly sign-ups consistently topping 300 people. 

Although it wasn’t a no-brainer decision for the Daily Maverick to offer this benefit, it was a no-brainer decision for most members to opt into it. If they were likely to use Uber at least once a month, they would actually save money by increasing their contribution to R150

What they learned

People won’t give the bare minimum, even if they can. One of the assumptions that goes into the design of membership tiers is that people will give the minimum amount they have to give to get member benefits, so there needs to be a floor. The fact that at least 50 percent of the Daily Maverick’s early members (pre-Uber benefit) opted for the suggested R150, rather than the minimum R75, disproved that assumption, at least for the Daily Maverick.

Key takeaways and cautionary notes

Be smart about your nudges. A well-designed, well-targeted discount or reward can help nudge members toward the contribution level that you need to be sustainable, but choose these benefits carefully.

“We have been careful not to be pulled into the discount offer space,” Charalambous writes. “We made this single exception and it worked, but we have not offered any other membership benefits that don’t relate to the [Daily Maverick] experience in some way. We are not a corporate rewards program, we are a cause, and the membership programme should reflect that.”

Other resources 

Disclosure: Membership Puzzle Project has provided support to the Daily Maverick’s membership program through the Membership in News Fund.

National Investigative Digital native Making the Business Case for Membership Daily Maverick Designing our Membership Program

Newsroom overview

Who They Are
A national, born-digital publication focused on policy analysis and investigative journalism that has branched out into lifestyle, sports, and business coverage
Location
South Africa
Founded
2009
Launched membership
2018
Monthly unique visitors
3,500,00
Number of members
13,693
Percentage of revenue from membership
25 percent

In the months leading up to the Daily Maverick’s August 2018 membership launch, they migrated “just about everything” that the Daily Maverick ran on technologically, CEO and Publisher Styli Charalambous writes. By May 2018, everything was in place for a membership launch – other than the critical technological infrastructure.

Rather than wait to ask for financial support until they were technologically ready, the staff decided to launch a pre-membership minimum viable product. They had two goals: start bringing in much-needed audience revenue as soon as possible, and test some of their assumptions about whether, why, and how much loyal readers would financially support them so that they could have a more impactful official membership launch. 

When they officially launched their membership program in August 2018, they were thrilled – but not shocked – at the enthusiastic response. The donations drive and surveys to donors afterward had already shown them they were on the right track.

Why this is important

Launching a membership program has a lot of moving parts, and not everything will go according to plan. The Daily Maverick ably turned an unexpected delay into an opportunity to gather additional insights for designing their membership program, reducing the guesswork.

This case study is also offered as an example of a low-investment, accessible way to test some of your assumptions before committing to a high-stakes launch. MPP is sharing their approach because it doesn’t require any skills or tech beyond what most newsrooms already have.

What they did

Only a couple days elapsed between the decision to launch the one-time donations drive and the actual launch. 

On June 1, 2018, they launched a call for recurring, pay-what-you-can donations with no benefits attached. With that campaign they sought to answer the following questions: 

  1. Whether people would financially support the Daily Maverick on an ongoing basis
  2. Where on their owned platforms they would find their most engaged readers 
  3. What membership messaging most resonated 
  4. How button placements and color schemes affect signups 

They answered the first question simply by asking for donations in the first place. There were no benefits or rewards offered for donating during this time.

They tested their second question by placing a call for donations at the bottom of their long-form features and in their newsletters, and studying the conversion rates on each. Although they lacked the technology to A/B test different messages on their site, they gathered data to answer their third questions by running different messages in their newsletter to assess which motivations for joining resonated most strongly. They tweaked button placements and color schemes over the two-month campaign and studied the data to determine how that influenced sign-ups, to answer the fourth question. 

When the donations drive concluded, they surveyed the donors, treating them as a group of beta members who could inform the design of Maverick Insiders. They asked them the following questions:

  • How long did you read the Daily Maverick prior to donating?
  • How frequently do you visit our site?
  • You have previously donated money to Daily Maverick. What made you decide to donate? (Open-ended question) 
  • Which content most influenced your decision to donate?
  • Who is your favorite author?
  • What was your primary reason for donating to Daily Maverick? (Choose one)
    • Credible investigative journalism costs money and needs public support
    • Quality independent journalism is worth paying for – it’s the right thing to do
    • I no longer buy newspapers and feel I should pay for news
    • The newsletter is an invaluable start to my day and worth paying for
    • I’m aware that advertising doesn’t cover the costs of news publishing any more
    • My contribution helps keep DM free for others who can’t afford to pay
    • Other
  • We’re launching a membership plan for readers who want to contribute to the cause and engage with DM staff and other members across a range of platforms and events. Is this a community you would be interested in being a part of?
  • What benefits would motivate you to join our membership plan? (Please drag items in terms of importance to you; see image below)
  • What other potential benefits would influence your decision to join our membership plan? (Open-ended question)
  • Would free Daily Maverick branded merchandise on sign-up influence your decision to become a member?
  • Which Daily Maverick branded merchandise appeals to you most? 
  • What, to your mind, do we do well? (Open-ended question)
  • What do you feel we could do better? (Open-ended question)
  • Thanks! Anything else you’d like to share with us? (Open-ended question)

The results

At the end of the two-month test, they had 314 recurring donors giving an average of 100 rand a month (about $8) and 621 one-time donors, giving between the minimum charge of 15 rand (about $1) up to 25,000 rand ($1,670). Donors could choose how much to contribute. 

This told the Daily Maverick a couple key things about their audience that influenced the design of their membership program: 

They did not need to set a floor for membership contributions. Supporters willingly gave what they could, rather than the minimum required.

They had an engaged group of readers willing to provide recurring financial support, even without any benefits.

They would find their loyal readers at the bottom of articles and on their newsletter lists. Calls-to-action elsewhere on the site were less effective. This allowed them to invest their limited time and resources on the places they knew they would be most effective at converting members.

Button placement and coloring would have some impact on sign-ups. They experimented with a few arrangements, and found that adding a bold background and pre-selecting their most desired contribution amount (R150) helped swing recurring contributions from an average of R75 to R150.

That R100 average recurring contribution benchmark allowed them to develop more informed revenue projections for their membership program. 

They received 645 responses to the survey they sent to the donors. The responses told them a few critical things:

Mission-aligned benefits such as opportunities to get to know the journalists and a members-only newsletter resonated much more strongly than special offers and discounts. 

Their investigative reporting motivated the most contributions, and they also learned which journalists had the most loyal followings – two valuable data points for marketing efforts 

A resounding 92 percent of respondents said that swag upon sign-up would not motivate them to join.

Response from Daily Maverick’s survey (Courtesy of the Daily Maverick)

CEO Styli Charalambous told MPP, “At the time we were debating whether a high-value prize would entice readers to join, and it ranked so poorly that it emphatically ended the debate for us.”

What they learned

From these data points and survey results, the Daily Maverick inferred the following:

Their cause alone was enough to motivate readers to support them financially. If more than 300 people were willing to become recurring supporters without receiving anything in return, offering benefits and a sense of community via a membership program would lead to even stronger returns.

A pay-what-you-can model, which would make membership financially accessible to more readers, had viability. They could reasonably expect an average contribution of 100 rand (about $8) a month and readers who could give more might do so.

They did not need to implement a paywall to incentivize people to support their work. 

Cause-driven membership appeals would resonate more strongly than membership appeals tied to perks, particularly those oriented around keeping the journalism freely accessible.

The experiment also changed the way the Daily Maverick thought about testing new ideas. The success of this test encouraged them to suppress their “perfectionist” tendencies and just try things. 
As Charalmbous wrote on Medium, “This was a great example for us to show us how we could launch something good enough, very quickly that could test multiple hypotheses and provide rich data and insights that are currently still being used today. It’s fair to say our membership launch was more successful because of it and we made fewer mistakes along the way. MVPs are a useful way to be more audience-centric because it removes the guesswork and assumptions from decision-making and actual user behaviour is used.”

Key takeaways and cautionary notes

If you have clarity about what you need to know about your audience members, it’s easy to design tests to find that out. When designing tests, it’s helpful to go back to the basic framework of a scientific experiment. What is your hypothesis? How can you test that hypothesis? Can you design the test such that you can isolate the variables and draw meaningful conclusions from the results? Your most loyal supporters are eager to see you succeed and can be valuable “product testers” for big strategic changes like launching membership.

Other resources 

Disclosure: Membership Puzzle Project has provided support to the Daily Maverick’s membership program through the Membership in News Fund.

National Investigative Digital native Conducting Audience Research Daily Maverick Adopting a Product Mindset Designing our Membership Program Launching Membership

Newsroom overview

Who They Are
A national, born-digital publication focused on policy analysis and investigative journalism that has branched out into lifestyle, sports, and business coverage.
Location
South Africa
Founded
2009
Launched membership
2018
Monthly unique visitors
3,500,000
Number of members
13,693
Percentage of revenue form membership
25 percent

When the Daily Maverick launched its Maverick Insiders program in 2018, two people were working on the membership effort. Two years on, the Maverick Insiders team has grown to seven, with roles including a general manager, membership retention manager, and marketing ninja. They have found that some areas need dedicated roles – such as events and retention – while others can see skills and responsibilities come together in unusual combinations. 

This case study explains what hires were made for the Insiders team, when, and why, as well as how the Insiders team now works together with the rest of the Daily Maverick newsroom.

Why this is important

The way the Daily Maverick grew its Maverick Insiders team offers one blueprint for staffing a full-service membership team – from product to community management, events to marketing, and tech to retention. The Insiders experience offers a great example of how to build gradually by prioritizing your membership needs, and then using that team to distribute membership efforts across your organization more widely.

What they did

Prior to the launch of Maverick Insiders, there were two people working on getting the program off the ground. Publisher Styli Charalambous led the planning of the program, acted as product manager, and secured buy-in throughout the company, while former head of product Brett Lensvelt considered how technology, editorial, and business, would all work together to implement the program. 

This two-person team worked with external developers for engineering and testing requirements as they built out an MVP. After that showed promise, they realized  that Insiders would need someone working on it full-time after launch.  Publisher Styli said they were looking for an “allrounder” to take on the coordination of member events, member-related copywriting, liaising with editorial, public speaking, and more. Francesca Beighton was hired two weeks after the program’s full launch, initially as a part-time community manager, but within two months this role went full time, and Beighton (now Maverick Insiders’ General Manager) was charged with running the program and building the membership team out. 

With member communication and engagement a high priority, this build-out began with graphic designer and community manager Sahra Heuwel, who was already a designer at the Daily Maverick. Her responsibilities include everything from creating forms and surveys, to designing direct mailers and banners, to managing comment moderators, researching new comments policies and platforms, answering member emails, and managing the inbox support team.

Five months after launch Tinashe Munyuki joined the team to help with inbox support. With maintaining hard-won members another top priority, he is now Membership Retention Manager.  At eight months, events specialist Nicole Williamson came on board (her job description grew to include “Live Journalism Manager” once the coronavirus pandemic arrived) , followed by Junior Membership Business Administrator Suleiman Krigga, and most recently Marketing Ninja Fiona Berning (full details of their each team members’ responsibilities can be found in The Results section). With the exception of Sahra and Head of Product Rowan Polovin, all team members were hired after Insiders launched. 

Beighton said: “I think if membership is working, you’ve got to be prepared to reinvest in people and training.”

Their next hire will be someone to cover member inbox support, currently the junior membership business administrator’s job, as well as bringing in freelancers to help with copywriting and design overflow.

The results

Today the Maverick Insiders team consists of seven people, with responsibilities broken down as follows:

  • Francesca Beighton, Maverick Insider General Manager: manages the MI team, edits the MI newsletter, drives membership growth, conceives and implements marketing plans, liaises with newsroom on all member-related initiatives, manages member benefit relationships
  • Tinashe Munyuki, Membership Retention Manager: manages retention and churn, manages MI inbox, provides technical support to MI community, leads tech training of support staff
  • Suleiman Krigga, Junior Membership Business Administrator: responds to community queries in MI inbox, assists with retention management
  • Nicole Williamson, Live Journalism Manager: concepts and implements events and webinars, manages speaker and sponsor relationships, handles logistics, manages budgets and invoices, assists with engaged journalism efforts
  • Fiona Berning, Marketing Ninja: implements and reports back on marketing and advertising campaigns, coordinates social media, provides design assistance
  • Sahra Heuwel, Community Manager & Graphic Designer: produces design elements for marketing and branding campaigns, provides membership support to MI community, liaison on community moderation, trains and manages member support staff
  • Rowan Polovin, Head of Product: project manages all technology related activities, tracks and analyses MI growth metrics

The team, Publisher Styli Charalambous, and Editor-in-Chief Branko Brikic meet weekly to discuss upcoming projects and challenges. There is also a weekly webinar and events meeting, and a weekly marketing meeting. Meetings to coordinate engaged journalism work remain ad-hoc, but they plan to formalize this process too. 

Team members report to General Manager Fran and work full time on membership, but Daily Maverick’s aim of being a memberful organization means the Insiders team get involved in other areas of the operation. Charalambous explained: “For example, webinars started out as a member benefit but evolved into live-journalism efforts to [serve] a wider audience that is now part of membership acquisition efforts. It’s run by the membership team and requires coordination with journalists and editors in the hosting of these events.”

“If membership is to really be about community building and for it to be a success, it’s our view it cannot be a siloed effort that sits on the side. It has to be integral to the entire organization and be the thing that brings it all together.”

What they learned

It’s crucial to have someone responsible for securing buy-in at the top. Particularly at the proposal and planning stage, this person will fight for resources to get things off the ground and act as a lobbyist or champion for membership more broadly across the organization.

Think outside of traditional role boundaries. Creating positions that play to each person’s varied skills and strengths. For example, Sahra Heuwel is both a community manager and graphic designer. General Manager Fran Beighton said Heuwel’s patience, calm, and natural problem-solving marked her out as a great fit for community management as well as graphic design, and the diversity this dual role offers keeps her stimulated.

Create career paths for people within your membership team. Fran said they are constantly thinking about how they can upskill their people. 

Staff elements that are central to your membership program accordingly. Be clear about how critical different skills and initiatives are to membership success, and prioritize those in your organizational chart. For Daily Maverick, this meant having a dedicated person to run and manage webinars and events.

A member saved is worth more than a member gained. In recognition of this, staffing retention efforts has been key for Maverick Insiders. 

Adequate training for membership staff requires time and space. The Insiders team has learned to step back and analyze what is and is not worth their effort so that they can refine their workload and make space for that training. For example, the team is careful not to spend time on unnecessary events, which Beighton defined as “putting on an event as a tick-box exercise as opposed to a genuine opportunity for an important discussion [and] engagement.” Other areas where the team have pulled back include unnecessary surveys or big-effort projects like referral programmes that don’t have the same level of return on effort. Beighton added that setting OKRs has allowed them to focus: “If it doesn’t serve our objective, it’s culled from the workload.

Key takeaways and cautionary notes

Prepare for success when starting out on your membership journey, and assess the resources that will need to be added every few months. You can “layer” new team members or skills onto the team in priority order. If you can afford it, it’s easier to scale back the resources you provide than to play catch-up. 

From Publisher Styli: “Membership touches every part of the business, every part of the business needs to be represented there, editorial, business, product and tech, finance might drop in, maybe account managers. We buy into the fact that membership is such an integral part of the organization’s effort/mission.”

Other resources

Disclosure: Membership Puzzle Project has provided support to the Daily Maverick’s membership program through the Membership in News Fund.

National Investigative Digital native Daily Maverick Staffing our Membership Strategy

Newsroom overview

Who They Are
A national, born-digital publication focused on policy analysis and investigative journalism that has branched out into lifestyle, sports, and business coverage
Location
South Africa
Founded
2009
Launched membership
2018
Monthly unique visitors
3,500,000
Number of members
13,693
Percentage of revenue from membership
25 percent

After two years of marketing Maverick Insider, the Daily Maverick’s membership program, Publisher Styli Charalambous and Maverick Insider General Manager Director Francesca Beighton mapped out, audited, and set objectives for the marketing strategy going forward. 

They also invested time in understanding and applying the behavioral biases that underpin consumer behavior, which has helped them understand what motivation they’re trying to appeal to whenever they write a membership appeal. These are the results of that exercise.

Why this is important

Categorizing, measuring, and routinizing their marketing strategy helped Daily Maverick streamline its marketing efforts, which helped to reduce the amount of time and decision-making required to execute. This gave them more time to devote to cause-driven work that makes membership more appealing, and also made it easier to adapt to the coronavirus pandemic.

This strategy document also helps keep Maverick Insider marketing mission-aligned. When targets are ambitious, it can be tempting to try anything to hit them, including exaggerating, making promises you can’t keep, and tailoring your message to increasingly niche audiences, warns Beighton. Having a North Star document gives staff members something concrete to hew to. It also helps when onboarding new team members.

What they did

The Daily Maverick records the conversion rates of every piece of marketing outreach at the weekly Maverick Insider meeting.  Using that data, they took a holistic look at what worked and what didn’t, then took a look at their goals for Maverick Insider and built the roadmap from there. 

The strategic overview includes the following:

  • A definition and mission statement for Maverick Insiders
  • An articulation of Maverick Insiders’ values, including how that presents in the tone used 
  • Objectives and key results for 2020, both quantitative and qualitative, plus an articulation of what part of the Daily Maverick team is responsible for each objective and key result
  • Characteristics of potential members and the size of their target market
  • A marketing plan for converting readers into members, broken down by channel (direct mailers, banners, post-article footers, etc.)
  • A marketing plan to raise general awareness of Maverick Insider and reinforcing value for existing members, broken down by channel (an onboarding series, press coverage, net promoter score surveys)

After establishing the baseline with all of the above, Beighton turned to the core phases of growth hacking to develop a plan for 2020 and beyond. Different marketing initiatives can be at different stages at any point in time. 

  • Test: Create a MVP. In other words, test a campaign to see if it resonates with our readers. 
  • Track: We need to track – and report – on what is and is not working using a combination of analytics and member feedback. 
  • Alter: From our reports, we should be able to pivot quickly and fix what is not working. 
  • Improve: We should be constantly striving to improve our marketing using innovation and our technical capabilities. 
  • Scale:  We don’t do things by halves in Maverick Insider. When it’s working, ramp it up and maximise our returns. 

Here is a detailed overview of the Daily Maverick’s Maverick Insider marketing strategy, including their actual targets for each channel.

The results

Using the strategic plan, Beighton set member conversion targets for each channel. The Maverick Insiders team will be spending the rest of 2020 testing different channels and messages to determine the right mix for reaching their average monthly member growth target of 1,000 people.

Marketing ElementNumber of ActionsTarget sign ups per actionTarget Total
Direct Mailers2150300
Banners41040
Post-article footers525125
Newsletter footers41560
Social Media21020
Editorials17575
Webinars81080
Piano targeted messaging2100200
Referrals1100100
Total1000

With the basics mapped out, they can now get more sophisticated with their test/track/alter/improve/scale framework. 

They recently started categorizing their marketing messages based on the behavioral biases that each appeals to. Those biases, articulated in detail by social media platform Buffer, are: 

  • The bandwagon effect: The tendency for someone to do, say, believe something if a high number of other people have already done so.
  • The zero risk bias: The tendency to favor paths that seem to have no risks. (This is why companies offer money-back guarantees, for example.) 
  • In-group favoritism: The tendency to prioritize products and ideas that are popular with a group they’ve aligned themselves with.
  • Confirmation bias: The tendency to favor and recall information that confirms or amplifies beliefs that they already have.
  • Endowment effect: The tendency to assign more value to things merely because they already own them. 
  • Not invented here: Not Invented Here is the aversion to use products or accept ideas that are developed outside of a group. If you as a customer don’t recognize, identify with, or understand a product or service you’re less likely to use it. To counter this, newer companies often align themselves with better-known brands. 

Another not mentioned in the Buffer overview that the Daily Maverick appeals to often is the “IKEA effect” – the tendency to value more highly things that you’ve already invested effort in. 

The Maverick Insiders team uses these biases to design A/B tests and systematize their marketing efforts. The biases offer a formula for good writing and can be used as a “checkbox exercise” to make sure there’s a strategy behind the appeal. Beighton often asks herself, “What bias am I writing to?”

It’s no longer “today we’re going to ask aggressively,” Beighton says. It’s “how are we going to nudge people toward certain behaviors?” 
See here an example of a recent direct mailer, which Beighton says was designed to appeal to the bandwagon effect (by highlighting the 12,000 members Daily Maverick already has), and to test the efficacy of reverse psychology (“You probably won’t be interested in this, but…”). See here another example of the bandwagon effect, published early on in the coronavirus pandemic.

What they learned

A systematized marketing strategy has uses beyond membership. Maverick Insiders is one of several components of the Daily Maverick’s work that needs to be marketed. They also have a books division, a robust events strategy, a suite of newsletters, and a budding podcast division. Going through this process for Maverick Insiders “makes it surprisingly manageable to keep track of [marketing for] all the different divisions,” Beighton told us. 

Categorizing, tracking, and analyzing has allowed them to build routines, design templates, and craft a realistic roadmap that they can stick to. It’s become a simple, formulaic process to determine the right channel and message for marketing something new, whether that’s a newsletter, podcast, or event. 

Putting the values down in writing proved critical as the Daily Maverick experienced a major staff growth spurt. They’ve added a lot of new staff recently who are still learning the value proposition and how to apply it to marketing efforts. “It’s so easy when you’re marketing anything to cross the line. It’s so easy to tell a white lie. The minute you start doing that, everything falls apart,” Beighton warns. “It keeps you honest, which is essential.”

Beighton said it also helps that Publisher Styli Charalambous is in the weekly marketing meeting and both he and Editor-in-Chief Branko Brkic are in the weekly Maverick Insider meeting, which helps keep the messaging aligned. “The busier we become, the faster we work, the easier and more likely we are to have an error in judgement. These meetings reconnect us with the cause each week,” Beighton said.

Key takeaways and cautionary notes

You don’t need deep analytic expertise to measure your marketing efforts’ impact. Simply categorizing each appeal by the type of message it conveys and tracking the conversion of each will give you valuable insights about what resonates most with your audience, reducing the guesswork with each membership appeal.

Keep your value proposition front and center. Without a common, well-articulated understanding of the mission and values of the thing that you’re marketing, using these structures can become overly formulaic to the point of lacking resonance. Getting the value proposition right is just as important as categorization, routinization, and test-and-learn process.

Other resources 

Disclosure: Membership Puzzle Project has provided support to the Daily Maverick’s membership program through the Membership in News Fund.

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